Robin Majumdar 2.0

Well, after many years of managing the various eBay affiliate programs through Commission Junction, I was one of the first to migrate campaigns over to their new in-house eBay Partner Network at the beginning of the month.

I’ll write an indepth analysis after a couple more weeks of usage, but thus far it’s been working relatively smoothly although eCPM and CTR numbers seem to be somewhat lower than back on the CJ eBay program (which is still running in parallel until the end of the month) … Mind you, the lower performance probably has nothing to do with tracking issues, and more with the cyclical nature of the sites on which some of these campaigns are running. Over at AuctionAds ShoppingAds, which provides the now famous user friendly widget creation system, April was the best month in terms of $ revenue in the last few months.

I just received this notice from the eBay Partner Network:

From: eBay Partner Network Customer Support [mailto:noreply@ebaypartnernetwork.com]
Sent: April 25, 2008 5:10 PM
To: ***************
Subject: Customer Support messaging issues on 4/22 and 4/23

Our Customer Support system experienced issues on Tuesday, 4/22 and Wednesday, 4/23.
If you submitted a question on those days, our system might not have logged it. Please resubmit your inquiry to ensure a prompt follow up.

Our apologies for the inconvenience,

The eBay Partner Network team

OK, so their service desk software is having a few glitches… no worries guys. Migrating such a complex affiliate program over from a third-party provider to your in-house system is one major project!

Hopefully my eCPM numbers will go up soon on the new EPN

eBay Canada is having another promotion offering eBay listings for 5 cents today, April 9th, for items listed on eBay Canada only. Another twist this time around is that in order to get the $0.05 listing rate, you must specify a shipping price for your item. Mind you, you should always list a shipping price; eBay has done studies that show the bid rate is much lower when an item doesn’t have shipping specified.

The offer expires at 02:59:59 ET on Thursday, April 10, 2008 - yes we Canadians get 3 hours extra because eBay time is based on the West Coast Pacific Time zone.

The usual exclusions (motor vehicles, real estate) apply. This is a nice opportunity to save up to $5.60 in listing fees depending on the initial auction price you set!

Timothy Sykes published an interesting article and brief interview with John Chow. Jeremy and John have shown that the democratisation of the communications medium can be exploited by the lowly individual.

Not only can an individual person gain viral readership and reach to a market, but they can actually monetize the whole effort. John Chow even got penalized and banned from Google for using somewhat black-hat SEO techniques … but quickly and coyly turned the normally disastrous banning into simply more content for his entertaining writings in his Live by The Google, Die by the Google series.

It’s important to note that both John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker had significant business experience in the tech/.com space prior to becoming (in)famous bloggers with 5 figure monthly revenue streams.

John Chow runs TTZ Media, and Jeremy is somewhat of a serial entrepeneur with recent major .com hits such as AuctionAds.com - which he sold off last year and is now known as ShoppingAds. AA was a brilliant way of leveraging the eBay affiliate program and it’s sliding scale revenue model that rewarded higher volume affiliates. Jeremy basically built a more friendly user interface to the eBay affiliate program, paid out 100% of the usual eBay affiliate commissions to AuctionAds “sub-affiliates” and pocket the increased percentage of revenue that he sent along to eBay.

Brilliant.

This just came in:

To SnapNames Customers:

We’re contacting you with an update about Oversee.net, the parent company of SnapNames. Moniker and its TrafficClub program, well-known service providers in the domain name industry, have been acquired by Oversee.net.

This will not directly affect your participation at SnapNames. However, the combination of services and capabilities by Oversee, SnapNames and Moniker bring all customers a menu of services that support needs throughout the life cycle of a domain name, including procurement, monetization and sales. Watch for more information in the coming weeks about new services available to you.

Sincerely,
Sudhir Bhagwan
CEO

Hehehe… merci Mario:

Ah so true, only this time - I’m in and out before

it bursts…